A blog for analysis and discussion of legal issues relevant to arms control

If you follow me on Twitter this won’t be the first you’ve heard, but my new book on Iran is now actually in print. The publisher agreed to put it out in both paperback and hardback from the start, so a copy of the paperback is only about $35, which I’m very pleased about. It means less in royalties for me, but more potential distribution and therefore hopefully more impact. You can see it for order here at OUP’s website. It’s also available on Amazon.

I just yesterday published a piece about the book over at Opinio Juris. In that piece I gave a summary of the legal questions the book asks about the history of the dispute.

I wanted to say here in particular that, with the publisher’s blessing, Chapters 5 and 7 of the book have been made publicly available on my SSRN page here and here. I hope that these chapters will be of particular interest to readers of this blog, who are interested in serious legal analysis of how the IAEA has handled the Iran case. You’ll find that material in Chapter 5. It’s basically a full fleshing out of the posts that I’ve been doing on this blog for the past four years.

Chapter 7 is the chapter on the JCPOA. This is the chapter that I had to wait for about 6 months to write while seeing if the JCPOA would really stick. But it is sticking, at least for the moment, so this chapter will hopefully be useful for understanding the legal implications of the JCPOA.

In this book I’ve basically said all that I have to say about the historical legal issues involved in the Iran case. Disputes over the JCPOA certainly will continue, and there may very likely be future legal disputes concerning the Iran case that I’ll comment on here and elsewhere. But now I can refer people to an actual book and not just to a string of blog posts to explain my legal analysis of these past questions. I’m glad to have that catharsis.

I’m in the U.K. at the moment, by the way. For the past two days I’ve been participating in a really interesting and useful Pugwash workshop on the topic of U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in Europe, and the discrete subject of nuclear sharing agreements among NATO allies. I’ll probably do a separate post about that.